You're ignoring the ISB debuff, which typically adds to raid damage but shows up on the meter as other people's damage.

Regardless, if he achieves roughly the same amount of damage with both specs that means they are at least competitive. I deliberately wanted to steer clear of taking a stand in the grey areas when I wrote the overview.

Well it looks like most of the other classes are jettisonning their triple-digit-page behometh compendiums to start from scratch for 2.3. Arelenda, once you get that rough draft into a more complete form, are you going to post it in a separate thread so we can scuttle this one?

Hi, I was looking for some advice on AoE but I couldn't find a lot in this thread.

I've seen a lot of Hyjal/BT warlocks using Hellfire instead of SoC, I havn't really done any maths on the subject, but I'm guessing my SoC will be doing more damage at the moment, since I'm affliction spec and stacked on shadow damage with low fire damage.

I see some benefits of Hellfire over SoC though, the spell can't fizzle if your target dies and you deal damage to every target, where as SoC dosn't deal damage to the target you put the seed on. But will it do more damage in the end?

Do I need a destruction build to use Hellfire, or is it just situational?

I'm affliction and I use hellfire in some situations. in hyjal I use seed of corruption almost exclusively, because our mages spam imp blizzard on the trash and if you get in melee range of a mob that gets rooted while you're AEing it is likely to decide to smash your face.

on a theoretical situation where dying is not a problem, the best dps for an affliction lock on a large number of mobs is to spam seed until mystical skyfire diamond procs, then cast hellfire, and repeat.

I was actually working on one this week/weekend to post up after I saw the sticky up top.

Arelenda if you could contact me I'd like to know if you want to work together on it, or if you weren't planning on making a post if I could use parts of yours?

I am looking for some reassurance from high end raiding American Destruction Warlocks who have good enough latency to not have the need to use /stopcasting macros to compensate for their lag.

I am sure most of you have seen the eminent change to /stopcasting shown in the 2.3 patch notes:

"Client spell cast requests are now sent to the server even if your player is already casting another spell. This eliminates the need for /stopcasting in macros to compensate for latency."

I am very worried this would take out any challenge in topping caster DPS as a Warlock as the playing field would be leveled between myself and everyone else in the raid with similar latency (mine fluctuates between 300-600, I learned to live with it and I top caster DPS the vast majority of the time by a fairly large margin, even when the other casters use /stopcasting and have a tad lower and more stable latencies). Do you feel that without the use of stopcasting you can say, outperform someone with similar latency, gear and spec?

At this point it just seems to me that the only thing that separates my performance from others with similar gear is my very efficient use of stopcasting macros, with that gone I am worried the friendly competition when raiding as a DPS Caster would be eliminated and the raid would be filled with clones doing a job that requires no skill whatsoever (I don't exactly see "tard checks" such as clicking your tears before cratering or killing a bunch of ghosts on Teron as challenges).

Thanks in advance.

Nas, I personally think it's a stupid situation where how good we are at playing the game is a matter of dealing with an out-of-game meta-effect like latency. You can still use a mod like Quartz to tell you when to press the button, and there's no danger of clipping now, but personally I'd rather do it by rythm than by staring at a latency bar.

I can sympathize with the idea that now there isn't anything particularly challenging at all in the play; this is why I'm affliction instead of SB-spam build =P. But I would rather have no skill required, than the only skill being a technical skill instead of a gameplay skill. I don't believe that's quite the case yet, but I don't have the motivation to find out. Juggling four DoTs is just more fun.

Hellfire is usable by destruction warlocks, as a low threat, less mana intensive alternative to SoC. Ironically, Hellfire is the _safer_ alternative for them. It can also be used to blow up already applied SoCs quick.

But Soc will _always_ do more damage per second, regardless of spec or gear, even if it only hits one target on detonation.

I guess I'll add this to the post.

As far as I can tell, you can now replace your "/stopcasting /cast Shadow Bolt" macro with plain Shadow Bolt, and that will functionally be the same as before the patch. I don't see how this would affect you.

Yeah, I used to be UA through our first couple of Kael kills, it was fun and all and I was still able to perform very well compared to the rest. However, it just doesn't scale with gear as well as Destruction does, and seeing rogues rip it up more and more with each upgrade drove me to spec into something that just scales well and keeps me competetive. Playing affliction is great, and it does require more "skill" and micro-management than Destruction does, but in the end of the day it is disheartening putting in more effort than other classes/specs and simply have it not show in the end.

I'm not sure what I'll do after 2.3 is released, speccing Affliction is definitley on the cards, but I'll just wait and see how I find raiding as Destruction after /stopcasting is eliminated.

I've already posted, feel free to suggest changes. I see it as a cooperative effort either way, but your contribution would be appreciated.

I was using Hellfire in Hyjal purely when SoC was getting damage reduction based on corpses.

The debate was about dps of different specs, not about the whole package. Besides, we raid with 3-4 locks most of the time (as long as they can show up) and everyone else is affli, so theres pretty much always someone with malediction. No need for two imps in same group either.

Point was that destro is able to outdps affli with even "crappy" gear (like mine missing lots of hit and crit). Or at least the requirements are lower than what everyone here keeps quoting page after page without any real proof.



I only have one gearset myself, not one for affli and other for destro. I wouldnt call it very mageish, Id call it crappy. I actually still have pvp neck and 2 pieces of merciless. :/

I just redid the spreadsheets to double check I didnt do some major mistake. Now with more careful look, I ended up both specs giving same dps.

1224shadow
1042fire
18,83crit (13,83 for affli)
9,99hit
642sta
381int
103mp5
10200hp
8000mana

Destro:
CoE/CoR, Corr, SB: 1065
CoE/CoR, SB: 1063

Affli:
CoS, Corr, Immo, SL, UA, NF: 1065

While reading this thread, I saw a lot of discussions about how spell haste is great and everything. While I'm sure that the people using haste stuff have enough experience to make such statments, I wanted a more "strict" definition of haste's value.

So, I did a little study about the value of haste for destruction warlocks (shadow bolt spam, including life tap influence). I know that my math is not flawless, so if some people here could read it and make constructive comments, I'd be happy to correct my model to make it more realistic.

(I'm sorry about the ads on this page, I'm working on finding an ad-free ftp :-/)
Passive Haste studies.


Note that I was able to express haste=f(dmg) but not dmg=f(haste), because I'm absolutely terrible when it come to simplifying equations. If someone figure how to do it, I'd be happy to receive an explanation in an MP ^^.

Is there a spreadsheet or something where I could check ISBs damage support for the raid if I raise my crit by 1%? My personal DPS would suffer a bit (changing [Boots of the Shifting Nightmare] to the [Pattern: Boots of Blasting] but I'm wondering if it will benefit the raid more (we usually run 2-3 locks and 1-2 spriests).

In this WWS, how does Illicit have 2 soulshatters in a 3 minute fight? Am I just being dense today or something?

Is this the proper thread to discuss the new 2.3 badge/ZA items and how they affect warlock dps (comparisons of the new badge purchasable haste rating and how they stack up against current items, etc)?

This is my highest:

Wow Web Stats

I have a question on the Crusade trinket for all you 0/21/40 locks. I was wondering how do you use it effectively. What I usually do is just spam SB away but i feel there has to be a better way. I was thinking of spamming a low mana rank1 curse until it gets to 10 then spam SB. is this the proper way of doing it?

question about spell haste items.

with my current gear you do think i should get the haste wrist or crit wrist & off hand from the badges in 2.3?

question about gear.

my guild finally killed Lady Vashj last night and we are on Solarian in TK. I was wondering if getting the Cowl of the engineer & T5 legs would be good for me but i would have to break my spellstrike set in the process. I plan to get the vestments of the sea witch when it drops.

here is a link to my armory.

any advice would be much appreciated.

Regarding Crusade and 0/21/40.

I generally will use the crusade card on stand and nuke fights like Gorefiend.

While I'm engaging, I'll toss 2-3 r1 CoW's up and then load up cor, coa, immo, sbolt, tap, and just start sbolt x4/tap rotation Generally when the stack first hits 10, I tap, then pop my use trinket, toss a CoD and start sbolt spamming. One benefit of this trinket with 21/40 is that it forces you to be not retarded with your time spent tapping and do it gradually in the midst of casting instead of tapping 3-4 times when you get low like I would first do after I had switched from affliction.

I'm not awesome at math myself, so about 3/4 of the way through there, my brain might have melted some. However, there's one big flaw I was able to see, which is that a 21/40 shadow lock is most likely going to have spent the talent points to get 5% cheaper destro spells, leaving the cost of sb at 399, not 420.

k thanks for the advice. i think i will have to put rank1 CoW on my bar.

what do you think about using the crusade for al'ar since in phase1 you are basically standing and nuking until she moves to the next platform. how about Lady vashj since im on the NE side on elemental duty.